Iustus's Report - Epic 4 - Rome vs Barbs

[Iustus]

You can find my report here: Iustus's Report

You might want to just skip to the conclusions page after skimming a bit. I had a lot of fun at this event, and I took a strange approach near the end, which ended up taking much longer than I expected.

Who am I? I am relatively new to Civ4, I played Civ2 a lot a long time ago. My name is pronounced "yew-stus", the "i" is silent. (The name origin is latin, I have been using it as my handle since EQ1).

I was reluctant to make this post, because it feels like intruding on community, and I do not feel like I am that good of a player, but I did play this epic 4, and I thought it was interesting, so I went ahead and posted the report.

My overall conclusions are that it is near impossible to actually lose this event if you make it past the barbarians stage, so, while I was initially pretty happy surviving, in reflection when writing up the report, the amount of time it took me to succeed just makes my play look poor.

Because of this, I stopped adding screenshots for the end of the report, as I think it is much less interesting. I still have quite a few screenshots, and I will finish the report if there is interest.

Edit: All the screenshots are now included, I completed the report.

For those who want to see the replay, I included the replay file for download on the conclusions page.

Perhaps something can be learned to see how an average player plays, compared to all of you experts.

-Iustus

PS: I have had trouble registering to this board, my messages to the board admin have been bouncing at times, or just not getting replies. If anyone can help me get my registration straightened out, please private message me. The automated mail from the board seems to be somewhat broken, being lost most of the time.

[Iustus]

(edit) I guess it was not that uncommon to have most of the religions locked up inside the mountain wall. In a way, I was lucky that exactly one religion was outside the wall.

I guess not many people managed to get inside the wall, my final solution was to use subs, which was quite effective. Prior to that, Gandhi cheated to get inside the wall, with success (but no followthrough).

-I

[Iustus]

Quick summary, for those who do not wish to read my (rather long) report, some of this is not clear from my report yet, as it is missing key screenshots:

1. turtle for a long time early on

2. expand my defense to some key points, actually building forts for the first time ever, and they were effective!

3. deciding to conquer many, many barbarian cities, rather then build settlers

4. Meeting gandhi, becoming best pals. Meeting Qin. Meeting a French caravel, Gandhi hates him, so I do too. Gandhi and Qin are both Taoist, and I am able to switch quickly as well.

5. A massive land grab, my grenadiers and riflemen vs barbarian the same, and Gandhi's gunships and mech inf. (Qin also figures in a little). I manage to grab quite a few barbarian cites, quite some distance from my capital.

Around this time, the French fight a war with the Spanish, and take one city, this will be important later.

6. A huge culture fight, from the end of the barbarians, to the end of the game, my culture slider was always more than zero, perhaps closer to 50% while I was still researching, and at about 80% once I was done with the techs. While I gained a lot of land area, and it helped my war with Qin, I did not manage to flip many cities.

7. I declared war with the French to aid Gandhi's war around 1500-1600, and I stayed at war for about 1000 years, with no fighting for a very long time of course (Gandhi made peace a few turns after he asked my aid).

Interesting point, Gandhi had a massive modern army on the land outside the French. When he declared peace, it all popped inside the mountains to the Spanish soil. (Remember, there was a French city there now, the one he took earlier, so if Gandhi was smart, he could declare war again, take that city, and airlift troops in to kill the rest.

8. I used a massive fleet of carriers to bomb the heck ouf the the French, but despite about 50 years of no land improvements, and seriously shellshocked troops, he never offered me more than about 850 gold for peace, not the city I was seeking to get inside the wall.

9. Bribed Qin to attack Gandhi, (I think it was about 25k), then one turn later I attacked Qin, taking all but one of his cities on my mainland in one turn (thanks culture!), Gandhi got the last city.

10. I then kept my army inside Gandhi's borders on their continent, while they constantly took and lost cities, over and over, using my navy and massive carrier fleet to defend my home continent. When Qin started getting depleted, I invaded and quickly conqured and kept all his cities, paying Gandhi to declare peace when he was about to take one of the cities. (He had previously taken and razed one other).

11. I was at 62% land area, and needed 68% land area to win. I then spent about 400 years fighting culture war, getting up to 67.5% near the end, when other events intervened.

12. France hit me with subs (one of his mines poped a uranium), I first paid Gandhi to attack France (he took the one city and then stopped), and then figured out subs could go under. I then built 100+ subs (I lost about 40 killing his destroyer fleet, this would have been so much easier when I was bombing him before, had I known subs go under ice), but my 60+ subs proceeded to kill every wooden ship he built (he would keep building them), while my carrier based air power destroyed every improvement.

13. I had two main subs both up to about 75 kills each when his offers for peace, which had previously been about 10k, finally offered a city. There was a bit of luck the city already had an airport. Without this, I would have lost it, because the turn after I took it, Isabella declared war and attacked with about 20 troops (my massive airlift from every city was plenty to defend). I then took out Isabella quickly (she had no oil, modern armor is completely devestating when the opponent can only make artillery and mech inf). I then was going to take out the French, but as soon as the cities I took from Isabella came out of rebellion, I won.

14. Won the game, 2591 (yes, you read that right!), domination victory, without ever firiing a shot with my pal Gandhi.

-I

[mostly_harmless]

modern armor is completely devestating when the opponent can only make artillery and mech inf

That's what I thought, but it turns out it is all a question of numbers involved.
Good effort sticking with the game til the 26th century.

[Rowain]

Gratulation to your victory and your endurance playing till 2591.

Welcome to this board and have no fear not all players here are experts

You are right that the big chalenge was to overcome the Barbs nut as some games show if you misjudge the counterattack-strengh or get very unlucky with the AI decision process you can lose it still.

[rho21]

if you misjudge the counterattack-strengh or get very unlucky with the AI decision process you can lose it still.

Or, indeed, have Qin completely overwhelm Gandhi before you can do anything about it, and then head off for an easy domination.

Nonetheless, well played.

[Jabah]

Nice game, and good job staying up to the end to win it.

As an answer to some of your questions, in my game, the barbarians got horse, longbow, macemen, grenadier and rifle before I had the tech to build them (and sometime quite a long time before me for horse and gunpowder units). So accepting gifts was probably the correct answer.

Jabah

[Iustus]

According to Sirian in another thread, one way barbarians get techs is if every city has them, so I probably should not have taken the gift of gunpowder.

I have completed my report.

You may want to skip ahead to the new stuff: Chapter Six

Or, you might want to just skip to some crazy culture war screenshots: Chapter Seven

Or, if you just want to see the replay screenshots, skip to here: Conclusions

I am curious if anyone bothered to download the replay file and watch it themselves. (No need to respond if you didnt download it).

100webspace seems super slow right now, including my page. Hopefully it will be fixed by the time you are reading this.

-Iustus

[Rik Meleet]

Very nice read.

[Iustus]

Finally got my registration here straightened out, so you can stop refering to me as Iustus "3" and just use Iustus

-I